Portrait of the Artist's Wife
BARBARA ANDERSON
New Zealand in the 1950s is a place where men do the work and women have the babies. Sarah Tandy is a young wife and mother, and also a painter-while her husband Jack is a struggling, and eventually highly acclaimed, novelist.
   Portrait of the Artist's Wife follows Sarah's determined and successful efforts to keep her talent alive and growing, in the meantime contending with two daughters and her amiably selfish and philandering husband. The plot spans a period of forty years. The scene ranges widely within New Zealand itself, and in Europe and the United Kingdom, where Jack and Sarah make a highly entertaining expedition in search of cultural adventure.
   Barbara Anderson's second novel is filled with the comic verve and gusto which reviewers praised in the best-selling Girls High, but it also has—as Philip Larkin said of Stevie Smith—the authority of sadness. $24.95

Aztec Noon: Poems 1976-1992
GEOFF COCHRANE
'At his best, Cochrane is very good indeed ... his use of language can liberate meaning from the meanings of words, and that's a rare gift ... Cochrane's language may shine with pain, but it's still alive, and to that extent it's independent of him.'
—Ian Wedde, Islands
   Aztec Noon is Geoff Cochrane's first full collection of poems. Part One comprises 28 poems written in the last two years, in which his poetry has achieved an impressive maturity. Part Two is a selection of poems from his previous 'little books', which record both the development of a voice and a life on the margins of the city. $19.95

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
PO Box 600, Wellington